I'm free during the day Thursday and Friday, as well as evenings. The dependencies seem to be that we need to reduce expensive use of the printer, and this requires user accounts, and this requires some kind of shared storage, and this requires some kind of backup system.

Perhaps we don't need huge user accounts, or we can have a Forest archive, where people can put their very important stuff, and this gets backed up. Most stuff that ends up on the computers is temporary.

What I'm not sure about is how to share accounts between boxes when we don't have a separate server. Desktop machines lock up sometimes and we don't want one to bring down the others. The admin computer could be used for backups. Mirroring home partitions between all the boxes seems like a waste of space.

Has anyone had any ideas on whether any of this can be achieved without a file server? If this is what is holding us back, shall I splash out on a new drive and worry about being reimbursed later? I suppose the computer budget is still in the red, James.

I've never set up a network with all users stored in one place. We don't want to add 30 users to each desktop, so the desktop boxes need to know how to get authentication details from somewhere other than /etc/passwd. Does anyone know a good howto I could follow? I don't even know what to search for.

It occurred to me the other day that a NAS device might be better than a big old box. If it had some hackable firmware, we could add whatever extra stuff we need. Using an old box would mean more to go wrong.

It would be good to get some stuff working and I don't know enough about the bits of hardware lying around the action room (and the cupboard in the crafty room) to know what's what and what can be used, etc.

If someone in the know was willing to come in and help me sort through the stuff, I'd be happy to take the lad on getting it set up.